White House still confused about Flickr photo licensing

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

When the White House first began posting photographs taken by its official photographer on Flickr, it caused a minor kerfuffle about licensing: the photos were posted under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, even though works of the U.S. government are in the public domain.  It turned out that the White House chose CC-BY because “public domain” wasn’t an option Flickr’s interface offered, and CC-BY is the least-restrictive CC license.  In short order, Flickr added a “United States Government Work” option for the White House and the whole thing was fixed.

Sort of.

A friend just posted about a White House photo on Flickr, which is appropriately designated as a United States Government Work.  However, beneath the photo is the following text:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, or promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Several things about the section in bold are problematic.  The first is that it contradicts the law, and the government’s own statement of the law (linked to from the Flickr page), by prohibiting derivative works as well as, it would seem, many other permissible uses.  The limitation to publication by news organizations contradicts the public’s right to distribute copies of the photos, and to display them.  The release by “the subject(s) of the photograph” may be intended to remind users that some states recognize individuals’ rights to the use of their likeness in certain limited contexts (recall another Flickr-related licensing dispute), but those laws do not justify a broad proscription on use by anyone other than news organizations.

Maybe after one more time around, the White House will figure out what “public domain” really means.

Posted in i am a lawyer, politicking | No Comments »

My Pioneers theme: ccFlickr

Friday, April 11th, 2008

The Settlers of Catan is a sweet, nerdy, hex-based strategy game. Pioneers is a free software implementation of ‘Settlers’ — some co-workers and I have taken to playing it in the SFLC conference room (and over the tubes) after hours, typically with scotch and pizza. It’s great, you should do it.

They say that every contribution to a free software project begins with one developer’s itch (to see a new feature implemented, a bug fixed, etc.), and the graphical themes (e.g.) that shipped with v.0.11.3 of Pioneers made my brain itch something fierce. So I made a new one. ccFlickr, as the name suggests, is cobbled together from Creative Commons-licensed images harvested from Flickr. Here is a screenshot:

The ccFlickr theme

Download ccFlickr

To install, just place the ccFlickr directory in the directory with all of your other themes. In Ubuntu Linux, this is: /usr/share/games/pioneers/themes/

It’s a first effort, but I’m happy with the result. The one problem I’ve noticed is that, because I made tiles with the exact dimensions of a hex (rather than making smaller images to tile), space sometimes shows up between tiles upon resizing the window. Not sure whether this is an issue with the scaling algorithm, could be fixed by making the tiles rectangles (the space is usually on the diagonal), or if it’s unavoidable.

All of the images I used to make the theme are licensed CC BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike), so that they can be distributed with the GPL-licensed program. Some images were originally (or still are) licensed CC BY-NC-SA on Flickr. In each of these cases I requested a BY-SA license to the images, and the authors were kind enough to grant one, either by changing the public license on Flickr or by simply giving me a one-off grant of permissions. Here are the images:

Posted in projects | No Comments »